There is a famous book by the Nobel Prize physicist Richard Feynman titled Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman. I couldn’t help but think of that title during my last few adventures at local car dealerships. In the first instance, we had our vehicle serviced at a large local dealership. When we went to the service department to pay our hefty bill, the cashier excused herself, went into a back room and returned with a cardboard box filled with paperwork. She then proceeded to search through this pile of invoices until she found ours. Huh? Had we accidentally stepped back in time to 1982? Should we head home to watch the latest video on MTV? Okay, maybe their computers were down and they had to temporarily go old school. Things happen. A few weeks later we returned for another major repair.

Do you remember 2008? The financial crisis, the beginning of the “Great Recession”?

What a great time to start a business right? But wait, it gets better. How about starting a business in the automotive industry? At a time when many large automakers were teetering on the verge of bankruptcy and closing dealerships, seven years ago, Motive Retail was opening its doors for the very first time. Why? Because we knew 2 things:

1) The automotive industry would come back stronger than ever

2) We were incredibly passionate about the industry and had a great idea that we needed to share

"I Never Worry About Action, Only Inaction" Winston Churchill Humans are pre-programmed to avoid risk and seek safety. We only overcome the need for safety when we believe that the reward will be bigger than the risk. The limitation of that thinking is that risk/reward is a matter of perception (influenced by many factors) and thus not always based on fact. If our perception is that the risk is greater than the reward, we often choose inaction. We may falsely believe that the best choice is no choice; to maintain the status quo. This can be especially true with technology. Some OEMs have a measure of fear, uncertainty and doubt that causes delays in upgrading their technology infrastructure.

Until now Motive has provided certification services strictly as a managed service based on our Motive Integrator software. This approach has worked well as Motive Integrator provided the platform on which Motive Integration Analysts have delivered more than 150 dealer system certifications. In the process we have continuously improved Motive Integrator to make the support and certification process more and more intuitive and increasingly automated. The result is a proven system that can stand on its own and deliver certified dealer systems supported by OEM teams as easily as Motive’s team.

Most automakers offer their dealers at least a limited set of interfaces for integration of the DMS with OEM systems to simplify routine activities like parts ordering and financial statement submission. A few OEMs provide a broader set of higher value integration points that are producing big improvements in dealership operations. Motive Retail is honored to have been entrusted with the job of putting these interfaces to work for several OEMs. These OEMs are enabling big operational improvements for their dealers. But dealers have still been hampered by the inability of the systems within the dealership to effectively, reliably and securely interact with each other.

Today we're announcing a significant enhancement in functionality to Motive Integrator. New Dealer Roll-out Management Apps have been added for our automaker clients to complement the functionality already available in the Motive Integrator Dealer Suite. These apps provide automakers a consistent, structured and streamlined set of tools for use during the launch of new software, interfaces or programs to their dealer networks.

We’ve been working for the past 5 years to expand the functionality in Motive Integrator and refine our processes for Dealer System Certification. Feedback from the DSPs we work with on behalf of our OEM clients is invaluable and we take all comments, suggestions, even criticisms seriously. We want to know what works, what we can improve and what users of Motive Integrator like or don’t like. Our feeling is that the better we can make our tools and processes, the faster DSPs can complete new integrations and roll them out to dealers.

Over 13 years at Jaguar Land Rover I've been personally involved in dealer systems integration and have pretty deep expertise in this area through hands on experience. I've been responsible for a number of projects and have the scars to show for it.